AMD Radeon R9 290X Review: Welcome To Hawaii

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3DMark Fire Strike Test

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Fire Strike has two benchmark modes: Normal mode runs in 1920x1080, while Extreme mode targets 2560x1440. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Extreme mode is explicitly designed for CrossFire / SLI systems. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations. Tessellation volume is reduced to 2.6 million vertices and the number of pixels processed per frame rises to 170 million.

The Radeon R9 290X was able to overtake the GeForce GTX Titan in the 3DMark Fire Strike test, putting up the highest single-GPU scores we have seen in this benchmark to date.

We should also point out the clear advantages the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II and MSI R9 270X HAWK over their reference-design counterparts. Both the ASUS and MSI cards were clearly faster then the reference cards here.